First there were “animal rights.” Now, the next logical step is being taken by increasingly mainstream environmental radicals. Watch out: Here come “nature rights.” Doubt anyone would pass laws actually giving “rights” to “nature?” They are already being enacted: New Zealand has granted the Whanganui River the rights of “personhood,” declaring it to be an “integrated, living whole” possessing “rights and interests” … Continue Reading »
This Sunday, Pope Benedict XVI will canonize seven new saints. His honorees include four women, two of whom—Franciscan sister Marianne Cope and lay contemplative Kateri Tekakwitha—have American roots. Their canonizations follow just two weeks after Benedict named German mystic Hildegard of Bingen a Doctor of the Church, a high honor bestowed on only three women before her. . . . Continue Reading »
“What about Vatican II?” I asked my Catholic friend, in response to his assertion that Catholic doctrine is stable while the Church’s understanding thereof develops. We were in college together, young bucks full of vim and vigor, passionate about our common Christian faith, even while we stood on opposite confessional sides of the Reformation divide… . Continue Reading »
To untutored common sense, the natural world is filled with irreducibly different kinds of objects and qualities: people; dogs and cats; trees and flowers; rocks, dirt, and water; colors, odors, sounds; heat and cold; meanings and purposes. A man is a radically different sort of thing from a rose, which is in turn no less different from a stone… . Continue Reading »
In his 1958 book, Reflections on America, the great French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain (who took refuge in the United States during World War II) claimed that Americans, for all their commercial endeavors, “are the least materialist among the modern peoples which have attained the industrial stage.” Well, that was then, this is now, and it isn’t Jacques Maritain’s America anymore. Still, there remains a link between money-making and idealism in these United States that is distinctive, and perhaps even unique… . Continue Reading »
Rex Mottram in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited said of Catholic marriage, “that’s one thing your Church can do,” he said, “put on a good show.” My wife paraphrases: “We hatch, match, and dispatch better than anyone else.” We have been to many weddings where love was obvious and the celebration was genuine. But too often, focus on the God-triune gives way to the trite and sacred rites are replaced by the rote. Unity candles are forgotten as quickly as they are lit… . Continue Reading »
Not long ago, while discussing the viability of a continued Eucharistic church given the dearth of priestly vocations, I told someone that the outlook is better than our perceptions would have us believe. In Maryland, Colorado, Missouri, and other parts of the Midwest, for instance, and even in the American South, some seminaries are at capacity… . Continue Reading »
A few days before he fell ill, Christopher Hitchens said in an interview, “One should try to write as if posthumously. Because then you’re free of all the inhibition that can cluster around even the most independent-minded writer.” At the time, he was on a book tour in New York promoting his new memoir, Hitch-22. One morning he woke up in his hotel room, “feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. The whole cave of my chest and thorax seemed to have been hollowed out and then refilled with slow-drying cement.” … Continue Reading »
There they go again. The usual gang of Catholic theology professors has signed a manifesto, “On all of our shoulders: A Catholic Call to Protect the Endangered Common Good.” It claims to warn us of the grave danger posed by Congressman Paul Ryan. The future of America is at stake! The integrity of Catholicism hangs in the balance! … Continue Reading »
Few freedoms are more cherished in the United States”and more vigorously surveilled”than the right to religious liberty. For government to discriminate against religious conduct”and make it the subject of heightened government regulation”would run afoul of the constitutional principles at the heart of America’s founding and undermine liberalism’s unequivocal commitment to religious autonomy… . Continue Reading »
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